TVLine Items: Malcolm's Mom Visits The Middle, Once Upon a Time Lands a Liar and More!

TVLine Items: Malcolm's Mom Visits The Middle, Once Upon a Time Lands a Liar and More!

Jane Kaczmarek will once more be in The Middle, though this time without Malcolm.

The actress, an Emmy nominee for her role on Fox’s Malcolm in the Middle, has been tapped to appear in a Season 4 episode of the ABC comedy, The Hollywood Reporterhas learned. She’ll play a career-college teacher who butts heads with new student Frankie (Patricia Heaton).

Kaczmarek’s most recent TV credits include Whitney, Wilfred and the short-lived Raising the Bar.

The Middle, meanwhile, debuts its fourth season in an hour-long episode tonight at 8/7c.

Ready for more of today’s TV dish? Well…

• Annabeth Gish (Pretty Little Liars, The X Files) will guest-star in Once Upon a Time‘s second season, EW.com reports. She’ll play a “charismatic, beautiful and mysterious” leader of a pack of humans who are actually wolves.

• Bernadette Peters will reprise her role as Ivy’s Broadway vet mother in Smash‘s Season 2, per Vulture.

• Fred Willard, Michael McKean and Ed Begley Jr. have nabbed recurring roles in Christopher Guest’s upcoming HBO series Family Tree, per The Hollywood Reporter. The eight-episode, docu-style comedy follows a down-on-his-luck man (played by Bridesmaids‘ Chris O’Dowd) as he begins exploring his heritage after receiving a strange box from a great-aunt.

• Josh Schwartz (Gossip Girl) has sold two drama pilots to ABC, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The first, an untitled legal drama from Schwartz and Chuck‘s Matthew Miller, centers on two young lawyers who, upon entering a floundering job market, begin working for an ambulance chaser. Wrongful Death, meanwhile, has Hart of Dixie‘s Donald Todd at the helm and is described as a “modern crime drama set amid the beaches, buildings and swamps of Florida.”

• Greg Berlanti is developing a modern-day Wuthering Heights for NBC. Per the The Hollywood Reporter, the drama, titled Napa, will set doomed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff against the backdrop of California’s wine country.

• ABC has acquired Troupe Stars, a singing competition series in which current and former soldiers perform, per EW.com.